~~~~
On Friday night, Gareth easily defeated Nails Fleming in the second round. The crowd went wild. They carried their new hero all the way back to Swanthorpe, cheering him to the skies and hailing him as the next English champion. "Bring on the Butcher! Bring on the Butcher! We'll show Scotland you don't tangle with an Englishman!" was the cry that burst from hundreds of throats. They left him at the gates of Swanthorpe, and with no more damage than a cut high on his right cheek, Gareth strode into the dower house an hour after the fight had ended.
Juliet, waiting up for him and trying to read by the light of a single candle, nearly wept with relief when she heard the door open.
Thank you, God. Thank you for keeping him safe.
"Juliet? I didn't di-ee," he called out in a sing-song voice that made two syllables out of the last word and teased her for worrying about him so. Obviously, he knew what she'd been doing all night.
She put down her book and, candle in hand, hurried past Charlotte, sleeping in her cradle. Just outside the kitchen she paused to compose herself. She didn't want Gareth to know she'd shut all the windows so that she wouldn't hear the distant din surrounding the fight. She didn't want him to know that she hadn't been able to eat her supper, that she didn't remember a single word of the book she'd been trying to read, and that she had nearly paced a rut in the floor of the sitting room.
But her worries, she soon saw, had all been for naught. He was standing by the hearth, unhurt, and looking no more exhausted than if he'd taken a walk through the fields. She noted a small cut on his cheek, but nothing more. A wave of crippling relief washed through her, nearly buckling her knees as she ran into his arms.
"Gareth!"
"Hello, dearest." He caught her up and kissed her. "Mmmmm, you look good —" he cupped her breast in one hand, rubbed the nipple through the fabric, and slanted his mouth across hers once more — "and taste even better!"
She pushed away from him so that she could better study him. "And you look ... virtually untouched. Are you sure you've even been in a fight?"
"Actually, no," he said, frowning, and it was then that she realized something was troubling him.
"Gareth, what is it?"
He sobered. "I am not sure, Juliet. But something's wrong. Something I just don't understand." He moved away and paced once before the fireplace, twice, then threw himself into a chair. "I sparred with Nails, my opponent, earlier this week. He kept me on my toes, he was so quick. But tonight ... tonight he fought as though he was half-asleep. It was the strangest thing..."
"Was he ill?"
"No. I don't think so. He began the fight with all sorts of nervous energy. Caught me a good one right here," he said, tapping his cheek. "But late in the first round, he began ailing. It was most peculiar, Juliet. It was almost as though he was — I don't know, drugged or something."
"Perhaps he was drunk."
"No. He had a few good swigs of ale before the fight, but not enough to get foxed. It wasn't that at all."
Juliet felt the first real tremors of uneasiness. Biting her lip, she walked over to his chair, sat on its arm, and waited for him to continue.
"He was just like Bull O'Rourke last week," her husband said, curving an arm around Juliet and drawing her close so that her head rested on his shoulder. "Rather sluggish, not very quick off the mark. Maybe the crowds didn't notice something was amiss, but I sure as Hades did. There was no sport in my defeating him tonight, none at all. When a man hits you, you don't just stand there and take it ..."
"So what did you do?"
"The only merciful thing I could do," he said, bitterly. "I ended the fight. I swung, he just stared through me, and I refused to hit him again. Instead, I gave him a good push that sent him to his knees. The crowd jeered me, but the devil take them. I couldn't stand there and abuse him for round after round, Juliet. It just wasn't right."
His arm still curved around her, he leaned his head back against the chair and stared dismally up at the ceiling. "I don't know what to do. I've thought about telling Snelling, but I don't want to expose Nails if he and Bull have an opium habit or something. Maybe they need that sort of thing to brace up for a fight. 'Sdeath, I don't know ... I just don't know."
Juliet moved off the chair, came around behind it, and began kneading his shoulders. They were stiff with unspent energy, the muscles knotted beneath her fingers. "Gareth ... if those fighters need opium to give themselves courage before a match, their speed and reflexes would have been compromised long before now, in matches with other people — which means they would never have become such renowned fighters."
"I know."
"And furthermore, if they'd been smoking opium, wouldn't they have arrived at the fight in that state, not become that way after it started?"
"Yes." With a heavy sigh, he bent forward so that his forehead rested in the heels of his hands, his fingers splaying up through his hair. "Those same questions have been running through my head all night. I just don't want to believe the alternative. It is too ... too monstrous."
"Foul play?"
"Yes." She watched his knuckles clenching and unclenching where they poked up through his hair. "That's what it's beginning to look like, Juliet. Someone is drugging my opponents before the fights to ensure that I win."
"Dear God." Juliet drew a deep, shaky breath, then bit her lip to keep back the words that threatened to spill from her mouth: Take us away from here, Gareth. Take us far away — from this awful fighting and whatever evil thing is going on here. Please ... before it's too late. Take us away, and back to —
Back to where? Blackheath Castle and the duke's all-encompassing protection? Even as she considered it, her heart rebelled. Gareth had worked hard to find a sense of responsibility, maturity, and self-worth. If he returned to Blackheath, all that he had so recently discovered in himself would probably go straight out the window.
"Juliet." He must have sensed the direction of her thoughts, for he rose from his chair and came around it to stand before her. He took her face in his hands — his powerful hands that were no longer white and pampered, his strong, capable hands that had sent men reeling into oblivion — and gently cradling her jaw, lifted her face to his. "Juliet, my love ... we will not be here forever. Please trust me on that."
"But Gareth, what if you're correct and there is foul play going on? Your life could be in danger."
"The fact that I already suspect as much will give me the upper hand." He ran his thumbs over her cheeks, then bent his head to kiss her brow. "All I have to do is continue to play along with the game, pretend I don't know something strange is going on — and with any luck, I'll catch whoever is behind this in the act and bring him to justice before someone gets hurt." He sighed and gazed deeply into her worried eyes. "I know you would have me take us far from here, Juliet, but I cannot run from this any more than I could have run from those highwaymen when I came upon them robbing the stagecoach that night. Please understand, my love. This is something I must do."
She shut her eyes and tried to take comfort in his strength, his faith in himself, the warmth of his arms as they enclosed her. She did not want him to play the hero again. She was afraid for him, afraid for all of them. But even as her heart quaked at the idea of the danger in which he was involving himself, she knew that she loved and respected him all the more for it. Another man would turn and run. But not her Wild One. He would not rest until justice prevailed.
I love you, sweet Gareth. I love you so much it hurts.
Sudden tears filled her eyes.
"Now, don't you worry," he told her, as he noted and mistook the reason for her tears. "Tomorrow I shall go talk to Nails — and Bull O'Rourke, as well. See what they have to say about all this. They're professional fighters, Juliet; I should not have won either match. But I promise you this. If something evil is going on, I'm not leaving until I get to the bottom of it."
She gazed up into his romantic, down-tilted eyes, his dear, dear face, for a lomg
moment. How very noble he was. How righteous and determined, for all his so-called wildness. And she knew, as she stood there in his arms, that the time had come for her to tell him that which she should have told him long before now.
"Gareth?"
"What is it, dearest?"
She took a deep breath and reached up to touch his cheek. "I ... love you."
"Oh, Juliet ..." He actually blushed, so pleased was he by her long-overdue admission. "You couldn't have chosen a nicer time to tell me."
"I should have told you ages ago, when I first knew. But I couldn't admit it then, not even to myself."
"And when did you first know?"
"When you took that bullet meant for the little boy. When you nearly died trying to save him — and all of us on that coach. I think I started to love you then. I think I've loved you ever since. I just ... haven't told you."
"But — what about Charles?"
She gave him a patient little smile. "I'll be honest, Gareth. Once, I was like everyone else in that I was always comparing the two of you. But as I've grown to know you, those comparisons have happened less and less, and when they do occur ... well, you always come out on top." She leaned up to kiss the smile just breaking out on his face. "Lately, I've come to realize that Charles and I would never have been this happy together. We were too much alike. You, on the other hand ... well, I've never had as much fun with anyone as I have with you."
"Oh, Juliet. I don't know what to say." He was grinning fiercely. "But I will tell you this. I've always been sure."
"Of what?"
"That I love you."
"Are you, now?" she asked, trying to muster a grin even as a tear leaked from one eye. She knuckled it away. Sniffled. Heavens, she was beginning to bawl like a baby.
"Yes. And you know something else, my dear, darling little wife? I'm going to take you upstairs and prove it."
Laughing, he swept her into his arms and carried her up to their room — where he loved her so well, and so thoroughly, that he drove all thoughts of fighting and foul play from her mind.